Can anyone help me boot into Linux Mint without pulling out one drive. Details on request. My comments are being rejected as illegal. If you log into the linuxquestions site you can find the details under my username.

06-07-2009

MikeTbob

Quote:

Originally Posted by archp2008

Can anyone help me boot into Linux Mint without pulling out one drive. Details on request. My comments are being rejected as illegal. If you log into the linuxquestions site you can find the details under my username.

Hello and welcome.
I refuse to browse over to linuxquestions, they are our competitors after all. ;) But if you want to paste your info here, I'll be more than happy to try and help you out. You might try some boot parameters at the BOOT:
If you depress F6, you can add any boot options needed.
What's the problem?

06-07-2009

archp2008

1 Attachment(s)

Thanks for the reply. I tried pasting the information earlier, but it was blocked as being the same as a posting a URL. I'll try it again as an unformatted text attachment. Sorry about the loss of formatting. RTF files are not allowable either.

06-07-2009

MikeTbob

Quote:

Originally Posted by archp2008

Thanks for the reply. I tried pasting the information earlier, but it was blocked as being the same as a posting a URL. I'll try it again as an unformatted text attachment. Sorry about the loss of formatting. RTF files are not allowable either.

I'm posting it for you, so others may be able to help.
Changing boot parameters in grub

Hello,

Quote:

I have my Linux Mint booting successfully when it's installed on one of two SATA drives. There is also a fourth drive (an IDE). I order to get it to work I have to disconnect the third SATA drive. The boot parameters in grub for that are working now for just the two SATA drives (plus the IDE drive) are (hd0,1). If I reconnect my third SATA drive, which I would like to do, Mint will not boot. I have had this problem before and it took me a very long time to find the parameters that would work when I added the second SATA drive. Can someone please tell me what (hd0,1) should be changed to for Linux to boot when the third SATA drive is re-connected. I have no idea how to ascertain what the drive numbers are, and I don't understand the significance of (hd0,1). Thanks in advance for any assistance on this.

Welcome to LQ---this sounds like a known issue with mixed SATA and IDE drives. There are at least two solutions:

1. Use the UUID designation for the drives.

2. Figure out how the drives are being mapped and adjust /boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly.

To see if you have UUID, go to /dev/disk. There will be 3 folders:

by-id by-path by-uuid

To have grub use the UUID, use this in the kernel line in menu.lst:

root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/<uuid_of_your_partition>

The (hdX,Y) form is the GRUB equivalent of sda1, hda2, etc. Because grub counts from zero, the numbering is different---for example:

/dev/sda1 = (hd0,0)

/dev/hdb3 = (hd1,2)

Thanks for the reply and the welcome. I looked into UUID but don't know what drives these numbers correspond with. In labels the names are familiar as they are the same as in Windows, but the Linux partitions are not named. My menu.1st has ... root=dev/sda2 I can easily figure out the ID of the drives by the physical size. Mint is on the 640 gb drive which is shown having 7 partitions, but I don't know what is on each one. I presume, but I'm not sure, that Mint itself is installed on the first 3 partitions. How do I find the sd and hd designations for the drives? I thought that all I had to do was to change the (hd0,1) so that the 0,1 are different numbers.

=======Devices which don't seem to have a corresponding hard drive==============

sdd sde

Thanks for this. Remember I had to disconnect one of the SATA drives to boot into Linux. This is what I get with that one drive disconnected.

Stick the other drive in and re-run the script from a liveCD - let's see the RESULTS.txt from that as well.

Did you have a look at those listings ?.

Adding that disk has changed the (BIOS) addressing: was

Code:

/dev/sda -> the 640 Gig (with Mint presumably)

/dev/sdb -> The Terabyte

/dev/sdc -> the 80 Gig

becomes:

Code:

/dev/sda -> the 80 Gig

/dev/sdb -> the 320 Gig

/dev/sdc -> the 640 Gig

/dev/sdd -> The Terabyte

I'd be thinking you are going to have to by by-id to get around something like this.

Thanks for looking at this again. Can I do this? Sorry, I don't catch on to what you mean by, "by by-id."

Code:

ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/

These symlinks will tell you which disks have what uuid. If you can't work out which is which by the /dev/xxx stuff, mount them, see whats what.

Ubuntu (and thus presumably Mint) supports UUID in the initrd, so might be the better option for you. You can use UUID to define the (grub) root, and also root=UUID=?????? for the mount in menu.lst. I don't like it because UUIDs can change - especially swap if you happen to install a second distro.

Doesn't help with the boot disk (sda) changing device though - its hard to write the (latter) MBR to point to the correct partition.

Sorry, if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm totally illiterate in Linux. You will need to tell me exactly what to change in menu.1st for Mint. Unless I Google it, I don't even know what to do to "mount" a disk.

Is all that I have to do is to type in "root=UUID=??????" substituting the the UUID numbers for the ????? for the drive that Mint is installed on? I'm about to try installing a new Windows OS

on my IDE drive. I guess that won't screw things up any further. If I have to unplug the first SATA drive to get MINT, it's not a big deal, just another annoyance.

06-07-2009

MikeTbob

It's kind of difficult to figure this out, can you just post the output of these commands please?

Code:

sudo fdisk -l

(thats a lowercase L)

Code:

cat /boot/grub/grub.lst

06-07-2009

archp2008

I tried to attach the results from Ubuntu (all drives attached) but 20 kb was too large a text file. This forum is not usable - way too many restrictions!

06-07-2009

Jonathan183

Quote:

Originally Posted by archp2008

I tried to attach the results from Ubuntu (all drives attached) but 20 kb was too large a text file. This forum is not usable - way too many restrictions!

All you needed to do was post command outputs :rolleyes: ...
From your txt file (but fdisk -l output would have been better) ...

## default num
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not change this entry to 'saved' or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default 0

With all drives connected you need to boot Linux (either from a hard drive or live CD) and post the output of

Code:

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/menu.lst
quit

Paste the output you get straight after the above find command. Although you can replace sda1 etc references in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst with uuid you will still need to use grub notation eg (hd0,1).

06-07-2009

archp2008

When I boot into the other Linux Distro (Ubuntu) which is on the 320 gb drive I get this: (hd2,1) The Mint is on the 640 gb drive. I'm not sure if the Mint CD I have is bootable as a live CD or not. I wil try that as well and repost. Thanks

06-07-2009

Jonathan183

Booting from Ubuntu with all drives connected what is the full output you get for

Code:

grub
find /boot/grub/menu.lst

after you quit grub
what is the output of

Code:

mount

Given the above info we should be able to post modifications required to Mint grub menu.lst and fstab files.

06-07-2009

archp2008

In the Live CD it came back (hd1,1)
I'll go back into the Live CD now and try mount
Thanks